Hej mrmoehner!

I was in the same situation some weeks ago. I was doing my final project in a team with two other developers, and we decided to move all our server/frontend stack to MERN. We had just discovered mern.io and seemed like a good boiler plate project to restart the buidling of our project. My way around it, and what I suggest you to do is the following:

1. fork the starter project to your github and clone it to your laptop
2. make all the neccescary setup so that it runs on your local laptop. You might have to install mongoDB on your laptop or provide some kind of database url in the config.js file.
3. Once you have the project running on your laptop, and you can visit the page from your broweser, then you can start making changes.
4. The first change I made, was to move from saving posts to saving "locations". Locations was the name of the things we wanted to save in our project, so what I did was:
   • I just searched all the project, and replaced the word Post with Location - in your case not Location but you main model entitys name -, or POST to LOCATION, or posts to locations.
   • Of course I was carefull not to replace the cases that the word post is referring to other things. Like an HTTP post request has to remain an HTTP post request. You should not rename this one to HTTP location request..
   • This gave me a good overview to all the folders and tiny little modules of the mern-starter project.
   • When I finished with replacing everything the project didn't work immediately, but with a bit of debugging I made it work. I have to say that the debugging part was easier because by that time I had already gone through all of the code once - carefully replacing the word post - so this was the second time already. Plus I had the help of the two debugging consoles, that of the browser and that of the server app.
5. I had the project running and serving/saving Location objects in about a day of work. Maybe two days of work, considering that I worked for an evening installing the mongoDB on my laptop and then the next morning I was doing work on changing the project. You can see the my version of the project code here , and the project running on Heroku here .
6. By this time, you wil understand a lot better how to make more important changes to the project, like adding new features etc.
7. I was completely unfamiliar with mongo, and react. I had some student project experience with mysql and angular instead. Anything more concrete you wanna change, for example the validators of REACT or some routing or whtever, you can easily find specific tutorials about concrete things on the web.

I don't have a lot of experience, I am just a student. And my group and I made a bit of a risky last minute decision to change to mern-starter, but I have to say that it payed of. We ended up delivering to our exam a better quality project, we got to learn a bit of react - we hadn't had time to go deep, but we will add dew features to our app after the holidays - but we can already harvest a lot of good practices and production ready features like testing, html sanitizing and different environment variables, provided out of the box from the mern project.´ Good luck on your exploration of MERN, don't forget to ask more questions!